A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic

by Laura Dodsworth

  4. FEAR IS A PAGE OF THE GOVERNMENT PLAYBOOK

  ‘Fear is the foundation of most governments.’

  John Adams, Founding Father and second President of the United States

  Once upon a time, the fear of nuclear war travelled on the wind from a snowy, far-away country, where an abstract red button might be pushed. The Cold War marks a starting point – out of a number you could pick – in the trajectory of the threats we have faced in modern times and the fears they inspired. In this trajectory, the weapons we fear have become smaller and the enemies closer to home.

  Covid did not travel on the wind of a weapon of mass destruction: we were told it is a stowaway on human breath. The threat is from the intimate whisper of your lover, pleasantries exchanged with a shop assistant, the convivial conversation of friends in a pub, a hug from your grandchild or silent travellers on public transport. The danger is not an enemy on the other side of the world, but every single person you come into contact with. And that means you are their enemy too.

  The ‘war on terror’ bridged an arc of exploitable fears between the Cold War and Covid. Terrorists could inflict destruction anywhere, at any time. They might be from faraway lands, but they could also be among us in a world of leaky borders, immigration and air travel. Suspicion could be directed at anyone who leaves a bag on the train station platform, or who looks like a ‘certain type’. Terrorism is smaller in scale than nuclear war – it destroys a building, or a bus, not a continent or a country – yet it is unnervingly random.

  But an infectious virus makes terrorists of us all. Anyone on the train station platform or next to you in the pub could present a danger, not just a ‘certain type’. The weapon we find ourselves at war with has reduced in size from nuclear bomb behemoth, to weapons concealed on the body, to the body itself. The enemy shifted from a foreign government, to foreign terrorists, to every single one of us.

  Geopolitical borders are now not just between countries but between our own bodies. We must stay apart, observe distances of two metres, wear masks, not shake hands or hug. All for our own safety.

  In 2020, we became the enemy.

  Once lockdown was announced, passersby on pavements danced a nervous minuet, keeping a formal distance from each other, skirting the edges of pathways, or huffing and puffing with ostentatious righteousness into the road. The anxiety was palpable in public in the spring of 2020. Many proclaimed on social media how angry they were when people broke the rules and breached their two-metre perimeter. People were scared, skittish, and defended their new borders from intruders.

  Can we be at war with a virus? Politicians and journalists think so. The language is martial: it’s the ‘greatest threat in peacetime’; we are ‘at war’ with a virus; we will ‘defeat’ it; NHS workers are on the ‘front line’.

  The report Behavioural Government,1 produced for the government in 2018, observed the importance of ‘framing’ policies and the language used into ‘a coherent and comprehensible pattern… by providing a powerful governing image or metaphor.’ The report gives the examples of describing crime as a beast, or as a virus infecting the city. Of course, language used by ministers is – at least sometimes – considered very carefully.

  Donald Trump kept calling Covid the ‘Chinese virus’, a foreign threat equivalent to a hostile nation. Angela Merkel said Covid was the greatest threat Germany had faced since 1945. Boris Johnson did his best to channel Churchill. In a speech2 in the summer of 2020 he compared Gavi (The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations) to NATO, revealing a seismic paradigm shift in how we perceive our ‘enemies’. The Metro’s front-cover headline was ‘Careless talk costs lives’ on 12 January 2021, evoking the Second World War.

  Truthfully, no government can believe that the virus can be defeated like an enemy nation; it’s a very different proposition. So what do governments hope to achieve with this fighting talk? War appeals to the ego, to the need to exert control. To offer hope of winning when we feel out of control. It’s easier to cast a virus in the role of opponent. But viruses are endemic, they are part of our history, our present and our future. In fact, they are part of us. Our DNA actually contains about 100,000 pieces of viral DNA, 8% of the human genome.

  Governments may feel obliged to do whatever it takes to steer us through a crisis, and that means we have to swallow it like bitter medicine, even if we don’t like it. War requires populations to be resilient, make sacrifices and obey their leaders, like soldiers obeying the chain of military command. Martial language reminds us of this.

  This epidemic’s course has been measured in deaths and cases. Wars are normally counted in victories, not fallen and wounded soldiers – those counts are saved till the end, but we were the fallen. Daily body counts reminded us of the sacrifice, kept the fear alive, and primed us for compliance. Fear works best in wartime.

  History shows us that governments have long used fear to control populations, from the ancient Egyptians to the vast campaigns of terror committed by totalitarian governments in China, Russia and Germany in the 20th century. The ‘Reign of Terror’ during the French Revolution, and the term ‘project fear’ used to describe the referenda for Scottish independence and the UK’s membership of the EU, did what they said on the tin.

  British propaganda was accelerated during the First World War through the War Propaganda Bureau, using films, the press and advertisements. You might be familiar with the graphical depictions of the evil ‘German Hun’ during the First World War, and with the mobilisation of the UK state apparatus to encourage its people to fight. Since then we have honed our skills. The weapons are sharper.

  Following the bloodshed of that period, the pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote much about human nature; that there was a ‘pleasure principle’, in which we are driven to pursue gratification, and a ‘reality principle’, in which society must restrict and control the instinctual desires in all people, to a socially productive end. His nephew, Edward Bernays, who was living in America, took many of these ideas on board and pioneered the ‘Public Relations’ industry, named as such because he understood the negative connotations with the existing term ‘propaganda’. In his book Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote: ‘The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.’

  Just how far do governments go? Edward Bernays offers a perfect example of how it’s done and it’s worth meandering at this point, away from Covid, to illustrate how a government will leverage fear and propaganda. Bernays argued in the US in the 1950s that instead of reducing people’s fear of communism and nuclear war it should be exaggerated, but in such a way that it became a weapon in the Cold War. Essentially, he wanted to weaponise the US population’s fear.

  In his series Century of the Self, Adam Curtis illustrated how Bernays helped to eject the popularly elected Guatemalan leader, Juan Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, and restore the malleable ‘Banana Republic dictators’ controlled by the US’s United Fruit Company. And he did it in a way that made it look like a victory for American democracy.

  He organised a trip to Guatemala for journalists and arranged for them to meet selected politicians who told them that Árbenz was a communist in league with Moscow. During the trip there was a violent anti-American riot, which some believed Bernays arranged. He set up a news agency called the Middle America News Bureau and pushed out news stories saying that Guatemala was going to be used as a beach head for a communist invasion of the US. The New York Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek, and Atlantic Monthly all described the threat and called for US government action. At the same time the United Fruit Company sent favourable articles and reports to Congress members and journalists.

  Bernays was also part of a secret CIA plot to remove Árbenz and re-install a puppet dictator. Howard Hunt, CIA officer, confessed tha
t they organised a ‘terror campaign’. The CIA ran a psyop to present military defeat as a foregone conclusion in Guatemala, and military support was provided to the new dictator of choice.

  Bernays created the conditions in the public and the press to reshape political reality through this cleverly crafted campaign using universities, lawyers, the media, business and government. The reason it all worked? He exploited fear and manipulated people. He believed in democracy, he just thought people were too stupid to be trusted with it and that rational argument was fruitless. He called his process the ‘engineering of consent’.

  Propaganda, as a heavy blunt instrument, had been used for centuries, but Bernays set out a clear scientific framework for how to engineer the consent of the public, even warning that these tools could just as easily be employed by demagogues. The key point is that Bernays saw himself as a true and liberal patriot, helping benevolent governments and organisations to overcome the irrational drives in their people to reach an altruistic goal. Modern politicians and behavioural scientists might agree with his ambition.

  At around the same time, in 1957, William Sargent explained in his book, Battle for the Mind, how politicians and religious leaders use ‘brainwashing’ techniques, specifically highlighting the importance of fear in causing alteration in brain function to increase suggestibility. He gave China’s Cultural Revolution as a specific example:

  ‘Fear of continued civil war, or foreign intervention, or both, convinced the Chinese Communist leaders they they must use shock tactics to convert the masses. A more intellectual approach might have resulted in a more stable type of conversion, but it would have taken dangerously long, and been consummated only with the gradual dying off of those brought up in the old ways of thought, and the growing up of the children in the new. To make a new China overnight, emotional disruption was essential; and so effective were the methods used, that thousands killed themselves in despair… leaving the more resilient millions to dance, dance, dance for joy at their liberation from millenniary bondage – until they learned to tremble at the periodic visits of the Household Police who now keep a dossier on the history and activities of every household.’

  Between all these examples and the present day, has anything fundamental about humanity changed? That doesn’t seem likely. No doubt governments and psychologist advisors are as tempted, and populations are as pliable.

  An alarmed populace will desire to be led to safety by its government. The more severe the emergency, the more a population will appreciate strong government. In the US, they call it ‘rallying around the flag’. In Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard, which explored the use of depth psychology and subliminal research in post-war United States consumerism, the ‘perfect president’ is described as a ‘father image’. In an obvious and visceral attempt to convey a strong paternal leadership, Boris Johnson said the government would put its ‘arms around every single worker’ during the epidemic. Some might welcome the embrace of the state, while others feel it as a stranglehold.

  People willingly sacrifice liberty for security during a crisis. This is not a simple exchange though. What does security mean? And is liberty returned when the crisis has passed? After a crisis some governments may wish to lengthen the state of fear, or exaggerate it, to keep the population obedient.

  Early in 2020, the people of the world realised en masse they would die. Of course, they were always going to die. But they believed they could die then, or soon, as a result of the epidemic. Mortality felt real. It could be that a modern-day death phobia, or at least our disconnect from death, has primed us for an over-reaction. If you haven’t accepted you will die one day, you are a sitting duck for policies which claim to be for your safety. There is mixed evidence about the efficacy of lockdowns. We do know that they have cost lives. (For a fuller explanation, see Appendix 2.) Yet people traded their liberty in the hope that the government knew best.

  Robert Higgs, the American economic historian, said, ‘The masses can be turned around on a dime on the basis of a crisis, even a bogus crisis. The politicians will quickly come running round to exploit on a crisis.’ He has good form for predicting the effects of crisis on government. In his book Crisis and Leviathan he postulated that the First World War, Great Depression, Second World War, Johnson–Nixon years, 9/11 and the Great Recession that started in 2008 all caused the US government to expand, in a pattern he calls the ‘ratchet effect’. Effectively, nothing is so permanent as a temporary government measure.

  ‘A crisis,’ Higgs observed,3 ‘alters the fundamental conditions of political life. Like a river suddenly swollen by the collapse of an upstream dam, the ideological current becomes bloated by the public’s fear and apprehension of impending dangers and its heightened uncertainty about future developments.’ Bewildered people turn to the government to resolve the situation, demanding that government officials ‘do something’ to repair the damage already done and prevent further harm.

  In an interview for Reason magazine on 20 September 2001 – nine days after 9/11 – Higgs was asked about the future of the US and its government, based on his studies of crises in the past. He accurately predicted more surveillance, the military increasingly being used for domestic duties, the enlargement of the ‘Big Brother’ state and that terrorism would not be wiped out.

  So, what does Higgs predict will happen as a result of the Covid crisis? In short, associated government measures will leave an abundance of legacies for the worse so far as people’s freedom is concerned.4

  There were significant changes in the UK following acts of terror too. The Prevent policy is one of the most significant of recent years. In 2015 it became a legal duty for public sector institutions to effectively engage in surveillance of the population for signs of extremism and radicalisation. We should remember that extremism and radicalisation are not illegal, and who gets to define them anyway? Let’s not forget that the Suffragettes were considered extremists in their time.

  The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 followed the controversy over bulk data collection by authorities which had been revealed in the famous Snowden leaks, and aimed to create a firmer legal footing for bulk collection and interception of communications, including your internet browsing histories. It allowed police and other governmental organisations to access information. Effectively it legalised the mass surveillance that Snowden had revealed.

  The Terrorism Act 2000 enabled arrest without charge beyond 24 hours and stop and search without suspicion. This basically allows people to be held for considerable periods of time without charge and for that to be extended, whereas normally the police can only hold you for 24 hours without charge. Chillingly, the UK might also have been caught up in torture since 9/11.5

  What was the risk to the UK population which justified these far-reaching policies of mass surveillance, stop and search and detention? Acts of terror create a whiplash of shock and fear, but in fact from 1975–2018 the risk of dying in a terrorist attack in the UK was one in 11.4 million per year.6 The risk of being injured was one in 496,464. It’s imperative we understand how much fear clouds our perception of risk.

  I interviewed Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, about the parallels between the changes to UK law and society after 9/11 and what we are experiencing since Covid. She didn’t hold back: ‘Covid has given the world an electric shock. It’s a time when measures can be introduced and there is little bandwidth for people to oppose. The extent of the changes this year is going to affect everything about being human. The point about liberties is when you restrict them you don’t just restrict the legal aspect of liberty, you restrict life itself. The reason we are in the situation we are in now is because of the precedents that were set after 9/11.’

  While we talked I felt a recognition in my gut of my own fears this year. She told me that after the war on terror ‘we were left with a raft of counter-terror legislation which had implications beyond counter-terror. It justified the global mass surveillance architecture that we
passively live under now.’ As I had envisaged an arc of fear from the Cold War to the present day, Carlo noted how the state had exploited that fear: ‘There were warnings from congressmen during the Cold War when fear was whipped up about ‘reds under the bed’ that we could take surveillance so far that it would prohibit the possibility for resistance to form. The big change we were left with was the massive internalisation of fear and suspicion. There is a hyper focus on security. It’s moved our dial on the preservation of democracy. Fear justifies actions which are purely performative. Someone seizes your tweezers at the airport for safety. And you tolerate it. That is the end of rationality.’

  Tony Blair used the threat of terrorism to give him a new moral authority. Fear of the enemy is how politicians maintain power and advance agendas. The Labour government’s military intervention in Iraq is believed to have motivated and strengthened terrorist groups and led to terrorist actions in the UK, from the 7/7 London bombings in 2005 to the London Bridge attack in 2017. Those acts of terrorism were in turn used to justify restrictions on liberty.

  In The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis says that politicians will eventually have to concede that some threats are exaggerated and others have no foundation in reality, that ‘in an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power.’ Are viruses and variants to be the phantom enemy?

  At the outset of the epidemic, politicians, journalists and even scientists may have over-estimated its deadliness. This is due to lack of knowledge (common early on in an epidemic), caution and even fear. But as the year wore on, it became clear that Covid was less lethal than feared. Globally, the average Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is 0.15%7 and the median IFR for under 70 year olds is 0.05%.8 Yet the UK government pursued lockdowns and strategies which created other impacts on mortality from other causes, cancelled GP appointments, led to businesses closing and jobs lost, children missing school, local elections cancelled, and many basic liberties curtailed.